1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the area of information management. Particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for dynamically representing distributed information, and more particularly, the present invention relates to metrics of IT systems and business processes in an enterprise environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many businesses are spending significant resources on various projects and initiatives. But there is no repeatable, auditable, reliable, controllable, automated, efficient or effective means to measure, monitor, and publish the performance, effectiveness, efficiency, and progress of such efforts. For example, a corporation desires to heighten the security of corporate data by deploying more than 50 distinct classes of component and instrumenting a range of business processes related to such an effort. The exemplary components may include routers, firewalls, anti-virus software, web caches, web servers, network and system management software, applications servers, ERP systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, application middleware, and databases. Related business processes may include making it mandatory to use a secure channel to login to any corporate servers, and requiring user password to be changed every 2 weeks to ensure password hygiene, among others. Assessing the performance of such a project or initiative is a very challenging task without an effective tool. The current practice for conducting a survey of security performance is unsatisfactory and relies largely on ad-hoc approaches that involve manual, piecewise automation, and/or the combination of both. Therefore, there is a need for techniques that provide rigorous, systematic, and automated monitoring and measurement of projects or initiatives (e.g., security, vulnerability, service level management, corporate governance, etc.) and represent the measurement effectively.